Co-op invests in £2m strawberry farm

The Co-operative Farms has invested more than £2 million in its fruit-growing operation in Scotland by opening a state-of-the-art strawberry-packing plant near Dundee.

It has bought a site at Longforgan, from Gowrie Growers Ltd and has installed packing equipment to handle locally grown strawberries for sale in stores throughout Scotland and across the UK.

The Co-operative Farms, part of The Co-operative Group, grows food sold in Co-operative food stores as part of its Grown By Us range.

This includes strawberries produced at its farm in Blairgowrie, which will now be transported from the farm to Longforgan where they will be checked, weighed, sorted and packed before being distributed to stores.

Around 800 tonnes of Grown By Us strawberries are expected to be processed at Longforgan each summer.

In the future, The Co-operative Farms is also planning to use the facility to pack Grown By Us broccoli, which will be grown on its local farms, with the facilities to branch into other vegetables.

As well as Blairgowrie, The Co-operative Farms also has sites in Aberdeenshire and Berwickshire, as well as a potato-packing unit at Carnoustie, near Dundee.

Rob Hull, The Co-operative Farms’ head of vegetable operations, told freshinfo: “The new facility gives us great control over the crops we are growing and will help grow our business in Dundee knowing we have the capacity to pack it.

"We are aligning ourselves closely with Co-op retail as the business goes from strength to strength.

"We are delighted to have added the Longforgan plant to our extensive operations in Scotland.

“This investment will help us to ensure we can get fresh strawberries, grown on our own farm, into our shops and to our customers as efficiently as possible.”

Most of the strawberries will go into The Co-op retail outlets but a proportion of Class I and Class II product will go to the wholesale, foodservice and export sectors. The broccoli is sourced from farmer co-operative East of Scotland Growers, which has 18 members.

In total, the investment is worth around £2.1m.